Mao, Humanity, and Faith

The way we think is the way we live. Our lives show off our values in sometimes horrific ways:

· Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, qualifies as the greatest mass murderer in world history, an expert who had unprecedented access to official Communist Party archives said yesterday. Frank Dikötter, a Hong Kong-based historian… compared the systematic torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants to the Second World War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in China over these four years; the worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55 million.

The extermination of 45 million wasn’t simply a matter of poor judgment. Instead, it had been the result of genocidal values. Marvin Olasky, editor-in-chief of World Magazine, reports that in 1957, Mao stated:

· I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left. I am not afraid of anyone.

For Mao, people, even his Chinese people, were little more than numbers. In the atheist/communist estimation of things, humans might have risen to the level of “animals,” but still entirely expendable to achieve their great progressive vision.

Mao and others were murderers. Dismissively, we call them “revolutionaries” or “idealists” to dignify their horrors.

But why shouldn’t we regard human lives as the necessary cost to accomplish our ideals? Perhaps a good idea, if achieved, is worth the price, even of the murder of 45 million?

Genocide is never justified! Why not? According to the Word of God, we are endowed with inestimable value, having been created in God’s very likeness. Without this revelation, genocide will always remain an option, however much we deny it.

Only the Bible stands against the degradation of humanity. Today, we remain numbers. We called “wet machines,” and are regarded as just another member of the animal kingdom. We are no more than products of our environment and genetics, lacking freewill, driven exclusively by deterministic forces, which dictate all of our choices. Should we be surprised when we are treated according to our diminished status?